[T]his dead-beat dad, draft dodger, check kiter, book-sale scammer, embezzler, thrice-married serial adulterer?!
(Gingrich takes political hypocrisy and chutzpa to new level, The iPINIONS Journal, March 10, 2011)
This is how I dismissed Newt Gingrich’s announcement last May that he’s running for president. And sure enough he did little in the following months to raise any doubts about the wisdom of my summary dismissal.
No doubt you remember the national laughingstock he became when he followed up his announcement by going on an extended vacation to Greece. Not to mention revelations that this self-professed fiscal conservative was running a half-million-dollar debt on a revolving credit account at Tiffany & Co.
Yet it’s an indication of how desperate the Republicans are to find a suitable challenger to Barack Obama that, despite all of his baggage, Newt is rising like a phoenix in the polls towards becoming their 2012 presidential nominee.
Remarkably enough, this rise is based solely on his performance in Republican primary debates, which they think would make him a formidable adversary for Obama in presidential debates. That’s it folks. That’s all Newt has going for him, which isn’t saying much when one considers that he’s been debating the likes of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain.
Which bring me to the reason why I feel compelled to dismiss him even now. For Newt is such a clueless blowhard that he actually believes being able to wax glibly on stage (without a teleprompter, as he likes to jab at Obama) reflects real leadership ability.
Never mind that the real reason people are tuning in to these debates is just to see Perry stuttering out more gaffes, Cain singing more gibberish, or Newt hurling more rhetorical bombs. Yet Newt is so impressed with his debating skills that he’s promising to hold seven three-hour, Lincoln-Douglas style debates with Obama if he wins the nomination — as if what this country is yearning for is a great debater instead of the great leader Obama is turning out to be.
But, notwithstanding how entertaining as these debates have become, nobody in her right mind wants to watch Newt debate anybody seven times … for three hours each time. Moreover, what Newt fails to appreciate is that when Lincoln and Douglas held those debates in 1858 they were speaking in each case to audiences that were probably hearing and seeing them for the first time. So the familiarity that breeds such contempt in today’s media saturated world was not even imaginable back then.
By contrast, chances are that even peasant farmers in China have already heard quite enough of Newt’s self-satisfying bloviation.
He may not send a thrill up and down the spine of the Tea Partiers and religious (anti-Mormon) nuts who comprise the base, but there are enough sensible people still in that party who recognize that only one candidate has a prayer against Obama next year, and it’s Mitt.
(And the Republican nominee is…, The iPINIONS Journal, September 9, 2011)
No matter who the Republican nominee turns out to be, I remain convinced that Obama will be reelected with even greater ease than Clinton was in 1996.
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